Your input is needed on Copyright and Open Access at your institution
SPARC Europe is helping better understand the topic of copyright for Open Access at research institutions across Europe. This is also fully in line with the goals of ERA (European Research Area) Action 2, which many Member States have committed to.
We can only do this with your help, so would therefore like to ask you to complete our latest survey, which aims to gain insights into this topic, including the following key areas affecting researchers:
Copyright of Scientific Publications
Author Rights Retention
Open Licensing
Reuse of Scientific Publications.
The survey takes 10 minutes to complete and needs to be filled in by the end of the day on Friday, 11 November 2022. It forms part of the work done as part of Project Retain, a one-year project led by SPARC Europe as part of The Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) Programme — which aims to promote change in European copyright and support Open Access. This is funded by the Arcadia Fund.
We greatly value your time and expertise! For any questions, please contact Vanessa Proudman via email at: survey@sparceurope.org. You can also read more here.
DIAMAS for OA institutional publishing: Over 100 institutional stakeholders identified so far
As part of the ‘Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication’ (DIAMAS) project, SPARC Europe initiated and wrote up a stakeholder mapping exercise where more than 120 stakeholders were identified by project partners. This took place at the Diamond Open Access Conference in Zadar in September. The mapping will form the basis of our engagement activities for the DIAMAS project, helping us reach the relevant target audiences within the institutional publishing community. See below for one of the mindmap outputs of this exercise and keep posted in our newsletter for further developments.
CoNOSC welcomes two new Board members.
Dr Daniel Bangert (Ireland) and Dr Alina Irimia (Romania) were recently elected as new CoNOSC Board Members. SPARC Europe really looks forward to supporting them in the coming period. While their positions officially begin in January 2023, they will join the Board on short notice.
CoNOSC Members meeting, 3 November 2022 Online
SPARC Europe is again hosting the November CoNOSC Members meeting online, bringing together national policymakers to share knowledge on OS policy in Europe. We will first hear updates from our members and discuss an activity plan going forward. Above all, we will discuss research assessment and COARA by looking at some of the following questions:
How are you encouraging your national stakeholders to join the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment: COARA?
What do you see as the main national barriers to reform?
How are you promoting change and good practice in this area, or what are your plans?
How could you provide further guidance and support to stakeholders?
Just released — New insights into OE/OER in European Libraries of Higher Education 2022
We are pleased to announce the publication of our report, Open Education in European Libraries of Higher Education: Implementing the UNESCO OER Recommendation.
The report presents the findings of the third edition of our annual survey of European academic libraries on the topic of Open Education (OE) and Open Educational Resources (OER). It explores the work being done by European academic librarians to implement the UNESCO OER Recommendation, almost three years on from its initial publication in November 2019.
Our 2022 report is structured according to the five areas of action/objectives of the UNESCO OER Recommendation and includes detailed recommendations for each objective.
This report also compares and contrasts differences with last year’s survey results. We show that awareness of the UNESCO Recommendation has increased year on year – particularly this year – with libraries taking more action.
On the one hand, we are seeing libraries increasingly getting involved in OE policymaking, and on the other, they are getting more involved in supporting OE support and implementation.
Nevertheless, many libraries still need to decide on what role to take in this environment. Building capacity in this area in libraries is still a priority, and this includes leadership skills, which is still one of the library’s key challenges in this area. Furthermore, a critical area of importance in Europe is the need for more targeted work to address DEI effectively in OE and OER work, which is still limited.
A lack of resources and few opportunities to engage projects, partly due to few grant funding opportunities, will stand in the way of accelerating open education. We are sure to see more actions taken to open up Higher Education when libraries continue to collaborate more together and with other departments, teachers and learners for more equitable access to quality education.
We encourage libraries and their institutions to read the report and the insights therein and spread the word to all interested in the topic. For any questions, please contact Paola Corti via email at: pcorti@sparceurope.org.
SPARC Europe has attended all Stakeholder Assembly Meetings on the Reform of Research Assessment organised by the European Commission, with the most recent one organised by the European University Association and Science Europe. The October meeting brought more than 200 participants together to provide feedback on the proposed governance and operations of the new Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA). Slides can be found here. Finalised documents include the Governance document and the Rules of Procedure for Working Groups.
This group has been developing a new innovative policy or agreement where organisations unite to commit to reforming how research is assessed, including Open Science. Although we were not part of the close-knit writing group, we fed into the policy together with other members of the stakeholder assembly meetings.
The Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment sets a shared direction for change in assessment practices for research, researchers, and research-performing organisations, with the overarching goal to maximise the quality and impact of research. SPARC Europe signed the new Agreement in October. We encourage our members to bring this to the attention of the senior management of their institutions. It will be an essential vehicle to enable Open Science in Europe and will accelerate making it the default.
Note that those that have signed the Agreement by 17 November will be invited to participate in the Constitutive Assembly of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), which will take place online on 1 December 2022.
ENOEL is 2022 Open Education Award of Excellence winner. It is our great pleasure to inform you that ENOEL is the winner of the 2022 Open Collaboration Award. This award is presented to a project or initiative that fosters the collective production of open resources and open practices with a shared goal. The OE Awards Committee selects this special merit award to recognise exceptional work in Open Education. Congratulations to all ENOEL members for your hard work in making this happen! View the winners here.
Open Education Champions talk policymaking
SPARC Europe organised another Open Education Café with the European Network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL) on 4 October 2022. In this session, we sat down with Catherine Cronin, Melissa Highton, Antonio Martínez-Arboleda and Marc van Oostendorp to discuss Open Education policymaking.
The discussion focused on how vital Open Education policymaking is, on what level, and how OE policies can be integrated into more comprehensive policies related to Open Science. There is a much greater return on investment in the work we do if we stimulate the reuse of our material since many communities can benefit from them with a How to milk a cow example, a case in point. We also need to define and understand licensing as we move our material around from platform to platform. Speakers agreed that libraries should be involved in policymaking due to their important supportive role.
The Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies library, Ukraine, is the 2022 Open Resilience Award of Excellence winner!Tetiana Kolesnykova, one of the members of the ENOEL, drove changes toward more Open Education not only at the local level but also at the national level, despite working in very difficult conditions. We are proud of their work, and we will continue supporting them moving forward.
The ENOEL Toolkit has two more language versions: Kazakh and Catalan. Thanks to work done by librarians in Spain and Kazakhstan, The ENOEL Toolkit is now available in 18 languages. All language versions are shared with a CC BY licence to enable others to reuse, remix, repurpose, and adapt to the local needs of each of the tools.
Since our colleague Agata Morka is presently on maternity leave, we have a few new people joining the team part-time to support us: Bianca Kramer, SCOSS strategy and community; Aricia Bassinet, SCOSS communications, and Elizabeth Joss-Bethlehem for SPARC Europe communication. Caroline Fardell will provide SPARC Europe with some necessary admin support as we grow. Wow - it has been quite a month welcoming and onboarding new faces! Please reach out to them if you have questions.
Past Events
Librarians at the crossroads of Open Education
Our European Network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL) community was part of the 11th Eurasian Academic Libraries Conference (EALC) titled, ‘Open Access to Knowledge and Libraries: Achievements and Trends’ which took place at Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan from the 27th - 28th of October. SPARC Europe’s OE Community Manager, Paola Corti, virtually presented the role of librarians at the crossroads of Open Education and how ENOEL activities bring librarians from different institutions and countries in the EU to progress in implementing the UNESCO OER Recommendation. View the programme here.
A professional path to Open Education
Paola Corti shared the tools and contents created by the ENOEL and some of its members (Marta Buist-Zhuk, University of Groningen Library, the Netherlands; Marta Bustillo, University College Dublin, Ireland; Kris Meen, University of Galway, Ireland; Celine Peignen, Technological University of the Shannon, Ireland) shared their professional path as OE Librarians during the UniLibNSD Conference which took place online from the 6th - 7th of October 2022. The event was organised by the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies in Dnipro, and the topic of this year’s conference was ‘University Library at a new stage of social communications development’. Read more about this event here.
OER in a time of Crisis, Ukraine as a case in point
During the renowned Open Education Conference, which took place online from the 17th - 20th of October 2022, Tetiana Kolesnykova (Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies, Ukraine), with the support of Mira Buist-Zhuk (the University of Groningen, the Netherlands) and Paola Corti, showed how OER helps support students and teachers in a time of crisis (with a focus on the Ukrainian context) and how a network like the ENOEL can help from a distance. Read more about this event here or read more about SPARC Europe’s session here.
The ENOEL Toolkit and localising content for many
Paola Corti, OE Community Manager at SPARC Europe, presented the work behind the ENOEL Toolkit’s localisation process at the EADTU Conference, titled, ‘Digital Reset: European Universities Transforming for a Changing World.’ The conference took place in Athens from the 19th - the 21st of October. Read more about this event here.
Upcoming Events
The MUNIN Conference 2022
We look forward to returning to the very north of Norway to the MUNIN Conference on Scholarly Publishing on the 29th of November – 1st of December 2022 to present a session titled, ‘Rights retention, open licensing and copyright - reforming the policy landscape.’ The presentation will be conducted by Vanessa Proudman (SPARC Europe) & Jon Treadway (Great North Wood Consulting). Read more here or take a look at the conference programme here.
Introduction to open access for monographs: compliance vs culture
In August 2021, UKRI launched a new open access policy, which for the first time includes a provision for long-form scholarly works, including monographs, book chapters and edited collections published from the 1st of January 2024. In preparation for policy implementation, a collaboration of UK university presses, supported by Jisc, have come together to hold three online events which will explore the wider benefits of open access for books, investigate the myths around open access for books, and address legitimate concerns and suggest ways to remove barriers to open access publishing. The first webinar in this series will focus on compliance vs culture and engaging hearts and minds and will take place on the 2nd of November 2022 from 15:00 – 16:30. Read more here, or for more information, please contact: events@jisc.ac.uk.
This news brief was compiled and distributed by SPARC Europe staff. Any questions or comments can be directed to Elizabeth Joss-Bethlehem, SPARC Europe Communications.
